As 2015 draws to a close and we are inundated with reports of violence and a growing humanitarian crisis, it is understandable that people may be feeling more miserable than festive and merry this holiday season.
Vancouver Coastal Health Research Institute scientist Dr. Helen Tremlett’s favourite discovery during her year-long sabbatical spent studying the microbiome – that constellation of trillions of bacterial microbes that reside mostly in the gut (but also all over the body) – is that baby elephants practice coprophagia. In other words, they eat their herd’s feces. Although the elephants’ behaviour, common in many animal species, may be unseemly to humans, one vital purpose of eating dung is to provide good, foreign bacteria to the young elephants missing them from their digestive systems.
An important and unprecedented collaboration between Canadian surgeons, obstetricians/gynaecologists, and family doctors aims to address the wave of closures of maternity services and small-volume surgical programs in rural parts of Canada.
The Djavad Mowafaghian Centre for Brain Health, a Vancouver Coastal Health Research Institute (VCHRI) centre, has topped 193 research sites around the world having recruited the most participants for an international clinical trial investigating the efficacy of a new multiple sclerosis (MS) drug called ocrelizumab.
A new evidence-based guideline published recently in the Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ) gives Canadian physicians the tools they need to better treat patients with iliofemoral deep vein thrombosis (DVT) (blood clots in the deep veins of the thigh and groin). Vancouver Coastal Health researcher and interventional radiologist at Vancouver General Hospital (VGH), Dr.
Across Canada, health care institutions are increasingly under pressure to stretch resources and shrewdly allocate funds in ways that result in positive health outcomes for patients. A study co-authored by Vancouver Coastal Health Research Institute scientists Dr.
Dr. J. Mark FitzGerald never planned on being a respirologist, but in the early 1980s while working as a general internist in Lesotho, Southern Africa, for two years, he witnessed the devastation caused by tuberculosis and lung diseases and it changed his life’s direction.
